This week: This is the second of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staff Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Alexander Johannes Kraut is an artist who concentrates on drawing and printmaking, sometimes reaching installative proportions. He has also created an amazing thirteen chapter wordless graphic novel. Kraut comes from a farming village in the Allgäu, and is now based in Kreuzberg in Berlin. He has lived in many places and exhibited widely in important museums and other venues including in Mexico City, Paris and New York as well as several places in Germany.

The artist was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Ruessellsheim artist Martina AltSchaefer (the interviewee in part one) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau. As a note to English speakers: Kraut’s name is not only amusing as the English-language slang for ‘German,’ but also means ‘herb’ in German, and ‘Johannes Kraut,’ called ‘St. John’s wort’ in English, is a plant traditionally used to combat depression and, in ancient times, to ward off evil.

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This week: Mark Staff Brandl talks to Martina AltSchaefer.This is the first of two interviews with German artists conducted by Mark Staf Brandl on the island of Elba, Italy. Martina AltSchaefer is an artist living in Ruessellsheim, Germany. She studied with the famed Konrad Kapheck and her creative work centers on very large, labor-intensive drawing in colored pencil on translucent paper. AltSchaefer has exhibited in many prestigious galleries and museums.

She also does printmaking and is an expert on mezzotint, about which she has curated shows and written essays. She was in an invitational retreat in July as a working guest of a foundation on the island of Elba along with Viennese jazz pianist and composer Martin Reiter, New York playwright Sony Sobieski, Berlin artist Alexander Johannes Kraut (the interviewee in part two) and Mark Staff Brandl, the Bad at Sports Continental and now also islandal European Bureau.

Also for all the Napoleon fans, especially those commenting on facebook, they were not in exile and even Mark was allowed back on the mainland without having to invade it.

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This week: Patrica hosts Brian, Christian Ehrentraut, and Martin Kobe for a conversation over blueberries, wine, and tea. They discuss the rise of Berlin as the new fashionable European art hot-spot, the Leipzig painter phenomenon, a German view of American cities, and and why it is important to promote quality painting in the face of the market. Christian Ehrentraut is a Berlin-based art dealer and director of Christian Ehrentraut Gallery. Martin Kobe is a painter whose architectural surfaces balance on the brink of collapse.
Christian
Ehrentraut
Martin Kobe
Berlin Biennale
Venice Biennale
Cannes International Film Festival
The Armory Show
Art Basel
Direct download: Bad_at_Sports_Episode_156-Christian_Ehrentraut.mp3

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Yes, artist Hannes Broecker has taken the middle man out of the gallery opening and made Color Field art that you can drink. Telling visitors to “Drink Away the Art”

By hanging flat, glass containers with a variety of cocktails in the Dresden, Germany exhibition space complete with spouts and glassware, viewers were awash in color at the beginning of the night and when they were emptied basked in the company of pink elephants by the end.

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